you literally can't get more than 40 hours of work out of people anyway.

Try 20.

For most of our existence as a species, 18-24 hours of work per week has been the world-wide average time spent satisfying our basic needs. All the rest was leisure, endeavours in curiosity and socializing. This observation still verifies with the few primitive tribes still around. It also verifies in our records of ancestral agricultural tribes. That's the intensity of work our bodies have attuned to over hundreds of thousands of years of recent evolution.

From my professional experience too it verifies, and I'm curious about what other people may want to report about that. People around me may log long or short hours over the days but once you substract the pauses, all the staring at the screen in a blank mind right after lunch or at the end of the work day, all the heated discussions about this hot topic or that, all the trying to figure out or motivate yourself about what you should be doing next, and concentrate on the actual, value-adding focus and thinking and doing, that's hardly more than 3 to 5 hours a week-day, typically 1-3 hours around 10 in the morning and 2-3 hours around 3 P.M. Even middle management types who try to commit, who show up first and leave last everyday, spend most of their time socializing rather than actually organising things up (basically they're downrate, modernized tribes' chiefs).

If you've got a flexible enough mind, it's a lot more efficient for you (and healthier and easier and saner and...) to wake up without an alarm clock, and not rush to the office, help yourself with organising your tasks with basic methodology, then get stuff done in those 4-5 hours. And outside of those hours relax, talk with your colleagues, allow yourself to enjoy your lunch, etc. There's litterally no point trying to force it beyond that.

Also, you'll benefit immensely from cutting the crap out of your life at home too. Stop inflicting incessant news updates, FB status updates, tweets and 24/7 information TV on yourself, your brain is NOT built for that kind of abuse. Stop thinking in terms of pain/gain balance: an hour of treadmilling is not compensating a handful of cupcakes, not in any way you can measure utility for yourself, ever ; and similarly inflicting huge stress and deadlines and job abuse on yourself so you can then indulge in a more wasteful home and car and lifestyle is NOT balanced either.

That one most precious but limited resource that you have in a basically fixed amount for life: your time... stop throwing it away so liberally. You just need to spend half as much as your income (give or take a quarter of your income, there's quite a margin) and then you can get retired in your 30s (or 40s if you're already late in the game), even on a $40-50 000/year job.

I forget his name...

And that's the punchline.

I'm a french citizen and I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this whole debate. I wish anyone genuinely curious about this topic could live my situation for a couple years, just as I have gone and lived in other countries to see and learn. There is no way to get a useful view on this from a single vantage point.

The only "businesses" that benefit from paltry economic growth and inadequation between the qualifications of the potential workforce on one side, and the qualificatio nrequirements of the installed industry on the other side, are the "businesses" that can compel you to "buy" their products, by law. Lots of unemployed, low-qualification adults mean an ample supply of cannon fodder for the army. Low economic growth mean low treasury bond interests which mean they get to print and spend all the money they need.

The sad thing is, depriving them of citizenship doesn't deprive them of their constitutional rights anyway. It's 100% pointless chest-beating.

What about his teenage son Abdulrahman, droned-down the exact same way ? He was hiking to meet his father, whom he had not seen in two years.

I think you should try your president for treason and war crimes.

Ah, that good old marxist crap about eschewing "formal liberty" for "real liberty". It makes more sense to distinguish between positive and negative definitions of freedom.

You'd have to be a fool to think any one can prosper in this world, that we all make daily, without exploiting others.

Actually, you'd have to be a fool to believe that mass prosperity can ever be achieved and sustained by taking forcefully from others. Quite the other way around, and quite the opposite of your premise.

Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Thank you for the links !

We should send robots first, to set up infrastructure

I would get 100% behind a plan to come up with robots able to semi-autonomously build up infrastructure. Let's try and get this done and working on plain ol'Earth first.

I seem to remember the thermal conductivity of an ideal gas is directly proportional to the molar density times molar heat capacity, so this sounds very counter-intuitive...

All I need a single public IP for, is for my VPN endpoint.

Keep in mind that polls are designed, and those internal to a political party doubly so.

Mars' atmosphere is about 1.5 % of Earth's atmospheric density. It's around 20 mBar, or eight times too thin for sustaining life even if it was pure dioxygen. For all practical purposes it's near-vacuum. And vacuum makes for a very good thermal insulator.

As I envision it, it will take the form of a gradual redshift down to absolute zero. Stars and galaxies' lives and deaths and rebirths will be coming to us in an indefinitely- slowing-to-a-crawl slow-motion display of unbearable length... and it'll never quite go 'black' as much as fade away asymptotically forever in slowness and cold. Much like an avatar of the universe's entropic death, converging in on us from everywhere at once.

Man, this *is* depressing.